It is too early to judge the overall effectiveness of NOS’s strategy of deep community engagement. The initial recovery of the pen shell population is encouraging, but a decade will be needed to see whether the fishers can continue to steward the population’s recovery or revert to overexploiting it. As pointed out above, the fate of OPRE is yet to be determined. Will it be a structure for building an effective common voice for ongoing stewardship, or simply a new vehicle whereby old conflicts within the community reassert themselves? Can it, as NOS co-founder Alejandro Robles says, “develop into a structure able to generate and distribute power, wealth, knowledge, values, and beauty in the community and beyond?”
On this point, some tentative conclusions have emerged over the past ten years.
The interdependence of ecological and cultural restoration
NOS is one of a great many NGOs working to help restore depleted fisheries, but it is one of the few that has embraced the interconnections between restoring fisheries and restoring communities. Once NOS relocated its office to the middle of El Manglito in 2007, many other connections and initiatives started to unfold naturally. NOS staff members helped build a soccer field for the children of El Manglito and also supported what has become a championship baseball team in the area. They opened an after-school program for young children, and later partnered with Ponguinguiloa to develop science, music, and arts programs. They helped establish organic gardens community members could tend and adopt within their homes so that, as Robles says, “the children could develop love and respect for mother nature.” In short, NOS became a pivotal element of the Manglito community itself.
NOS co-director Liliana Gutiérrez Mariscal tells a story of a recent evening gathering where a visitor asked Lindsey, one of the El Manglito children, what her father did. She responded, “he is a fisher and a restorator.” This gave everyone pause. “When I heard this,” Gutiérrez says, “it was very touching. I realized, for the children, that their identity had shifted because their image of what their parents did had shifted. We talk a lot about cultural restoration, but in that moment I knew that one of the most reliable indicators of any sort of restoration lies in the perception of the children.”
While this kind of deep engagement in community restoration is a daunting undertaking for most NGOs, who have only distant contact and limited credibility with communities on the ground, the overarching headline of the NOS story remains: true ecological restoration is cultural restoration. It is a fantasy to think that the two exist independently in settings like La Paz.
Following this path can lead to unconventional strategies and can challenge funders
The work of NOS has taken on many unconventional forms, such as directly investing in community projects, compensating fishers so they can do marine censuses that would normally be done by experts or the government, helping organize a cooperative among fishers and compensating them to survey the bay, and using collective learning tools that are far removed from the standard scientific tool kit of an environmental NGO. The conventional technical tools, like no-fishing protected areas, fishing quotas, and privatization rights to incentivize sustaining one’s ‘fish share’ are no less important in the Ensenada of La Paz than elsewhere, but NOS has complemented these tactics with systems-learning and community building tools.
Emphasizing community engagement has put NOS at risk by using foundation support in ways that were at best indirectly linked to the ecological mandates of the funding. Because of this, it has been crucial to secure a plurality of funding sources, including some whose donors personally know the reality of communities like El Manglito and therefore can get behind such a radical approach.
Justice as healing
While NOS’s story of the stolen clams might lead some to think that OPRE and NOS are too soft in how they punish poachers, others will recognize core principles of “restorative justice” at play, a movement itself that represents another facet of the global awakening around systemic change.
Barry Stuart, a federal judge in Canada known world-wide as one of the founders of the restorative justice movement, tells a story about his own awakening as a young lawyer when he was given a scholarship to study tribal justice in Papua New Guinea. “There was a theft where a young man in one tribe broke into the home of a couple in another and stole some of their possessions. The two chiefs were sufficiently concerned that they called a three-day gathering of the tribes to sort things out. I realized it was a wonderful opportunity for me to see native justice practices in action, but I was completely unprepared for what ensued.
“On the first day, each tribe told stories of their history and how they had helped one another in the past. On the second day, they talked about the future they wanted to create and how their willingness to help one another would be invaluable for that. On the third day, they had feasts and celebrations, then everyone packed up their belongings and returned to their homes. I was stunned that the matter of the theft was never discussed, nor were the individuals responsible for it singled out or punished in any way I could discern.
“When I asked the Chief about this, he said, ‘Our tribes celebrated our history, the joys and losses. We reaffirmed who we were and our intent to live in harmony. Everyone knows what happened and who was responsible. The offender knows if he ever does anything like this again, he will be expelled from the tribe. It is now up to him, and everyone knows that, and we are all there to help him, as the other tribe is there to help those he stole from.’”
Before he had a label for it, Stuart knew he had witnessed the roots of what has come to be known as ‘restorative justice.’ “The chief and the tribes had shown me the three fundamentals of their approach to crime and justice, and how profoundly it differs from our Western system. We are focused on apprehending the guilty party and fair punishment. In the native system, punishment is the third step, only to be pursued if the first two prove insufficient. First comes healing. Those who lost their possessions, whose privacy has been violated, know that the community understands their loss and are there for them in their recovery. This was a prime function of the whole inter-tribe gathering I had witnessed. Then comes learning. This learning is not just for the individual but for the community. When an individual commits a crime that harms another it reflects a failing of the community as a whole: we have allowed someone to grow and live amongst us without instilling proper respect. We all have to realize that and learn. Telling their stories had clarified the tribes’ journeys and helped each understand where they had lost connection with that journey, and how they needed to change in order to re-establish that connection.
“What I had witnessed those three days changed fundamentally how I thought about justice. For them, justice was an ongoing process of truth-telling, learning, and growing.”
In this way, the crisis of Herubey and the stolen clams brought OPRE to a significant learning threshold. They could not ignore Herubey’s violation of the agreement the community had made. They could not ignore the need to confront him. But the overarching pragmatic imperative was to help the community move forward in restoring its fishery and sustaining adequate surveillance of it. Simply singling out a ‘violator,’ or turning him over to the authorities, might have accomplished much less than the way the community did punish him, which involved suspending his income for three months while he surveyed the bay on no pay. They made him work for free as a public demonstration of his own restoration as a fisherman and as a member of the community. “The whole incident resulted in a such an important step forward,” says Alejandro Robles, “because it reaffirmed both the core mission of OPRE to restore the fishery and also the capacities its members had cultivated in learning how to hold a space where deep conflict can be acknowledged and allowed to work itself out. For me, it is very unlikely they would have been able to do this without all the collective learning work they had been doing together over the prior several years.”
Reconnecting
In many ways, the transcendent lesson one learns from the journey of NOS and El Manglito is the need for re-connection.
In one of their dialogue circles a few years ago, Hubert Méndez, one of the more senior fisherman who helped establish OPRE, told a story about when his father first took him out clam fishing. “As a little boy, I kept begging my father to take me fishing and he kept saying no. Finally, he said that if I got good grades in school, I could come. Several months later, when my grades went up, he said, ‘Ok, you can come.’
“So, the next morning I get up very early and went out with him. Suddenly he stops the boat and dives over the side and into the water. Then, I wait. And, I continue to wait. It seems like forever. I started to get very scared. I started to think I needed to dive over the side. Maybe he needs help. But I am just a little kid. How can I rescue my dad? I didn’t know what to do. Then, after what seemed like forever, he suddenly explodes out of the water with a giant smile on his face. What he said then I have never forgotten: ‘Someday, I hope you can see how beautiful it is down there.’”
Those of us who heard Hubert’s story that day were deeply moved, for it became evident that the real impulse to restore a fishery goes beyond simple economic recovery. It goes beyond ‘environmental stewardship’ in the abstract. It is about beauty. It is about people restoring a relationship with the sea itself, a relationship that defines them. It is about returning to who we actually are, an integral part of nature herself. It is about falling in love once again.